Thursday, February 28, 2013

Daisies and Butterfly

Last Thursday I went to my monthly parchment class, with some trepidation. I do not find this medium very easy to work with. It is tiring on both the hands and the eyes, and it is too 'slow' for me. I am used to making cards in an evening, but parchment has to be done in stages, allowing time for it to rest in-between each stage, and that's hard for me. Also our class has dwindled to just two of us, so it is not as social as it was. However I have mastered the basics, but at our last lesson we both struggled, and neither of us were very pleased with our end result.

Nevertheless, I decided to give it one more go so I turned up on Thursday and found I really liked the project Brenda had prepared for us. It was a simple DL card with some very basic embossing (the bit I don't get on with very well) and a nice, straightforward grid-work border (the bit I do like doing until my eyes give up and I start seeing double!). So I got stuck in with a more positive attitude, and although I didn't finish it at the class (10.00-4.00), I did finish it off when I got home, and have now mounted it up on a piece of green card (greener than it looks in the photo), held it in place with some sticky ribbon, and added the parchment butterfly. I positioned it to hide my only mistake in the grid work - there's method in my madness!

Of course, I thought it needed a touch of bling so I added a small rhinestone to the centre of each flower, and just a tiny drop of stickles to the butterfly wings. And for once I have a card that I will be happy to send to someone.

When I started parchment classes I asked the tutor what is the difference between parchment and vellum, and she said 'nothing', so I think I can enter this card in the challenge over on The little Red Wagon;

About Me

I now live permanently in Los Gallardos, a small village in Andalucia, Southern Spain with my husband Chris. It was hard to leave five sons, their partners, and seven grand-children back at home, but we hope they will all come to visit us when they can. The exciting news is that I now have a great-grandson as well.

Manualidades por mi.

The title of this blog is Spanish for My Handicrafts, because this is where I am hoping to share my various crafty hobbies, and maybe inspire others to try something new.I am a dabbler in all things and expert in none, so share with me my successes and failures. Use my ideas as you will, but please link them back to me.I am a paper crafter first and foremost. I started out with rubber stamps, but now I use masks, sprays, paints, inks, clay and much more. I make cards for my own use but not to sell, love swapping ATCs with other crafters, and am currently working on a scrapbook for each of my five sons, depicting their life so far.I also do knitting, counted cross-stitch, crochet and I am learning to make bobbin lace.I enjoy photography and am learning about digital scrapbooking.I already have a blog which is a diary of my life in Spain, so I intend to use this one primarily for crafting topics, but I am sure my animals will also show their faces here from time to time.

See also Kate's Adventures, my diary about life in Spain at mamapez5.blogspot .com